


Why Did God Fail To Improve Us

by Negansplumbusinmyrumham



Category: Grand Theft Auto Series (Video Games), Grand Theft Auto V
Genre: Alternate Universe - Prison, Guard!Michael, Inmate!Trevor, M/M, Masturbation, Past Child Abuse, Rape/Non-con Elements, csa mention, michaels alcoholism, very dark toxic Trikey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2018-12-10 00:45:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 8,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11680494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Negansplumbusinmyrumham/pseuds/Negansplumbusinmyrumham
Summary: Michael Townley, a young corrections officer, is left reeling after his estranged cop father is killed in a shootout with a drug trafficker.Trevor Philips, an air force reject turned career criminal finds himself serving a life sentence in a North Yankton prison for the murder of multiple police officers.A chance for vengeance begins a twenty year nightmare of passion, corruption, and manipulation.





	1. Another Ghost Behind You

The first time Trevor kills somebody, he is thirteen years old.  He doesn’t think he means to.  The events are out of order in his memory: 

-He’s pulling his wet t-shirt back on.  

-The man hands his mother money.  

-The features of the man’s face blur into themselves, melted-looking and drooping off their structure.  He brings the trophy down just to see how they rearrange with impact.   

-He’s laying on his front, hands over his head, waiting for it to be over.  

-His mother turns up the volume of the television in her room.  

-He grabs the trophy off the end table.  

-The sound of a belt unbuckling.  

-Final breaths bubbling through a broken nose, the rattling of swallowed teeth.

 

And then, for what feels like forever, it’s just three of them; him and the body and the theme song to a sitcom moving through the wall like a ghost.

_...Sunday, Monday, Happy Days... _

The drying blood sticks his shirt to his skin and that feels safe, like nobody will ever pull it off of him again.  He fishes through an impossible amount of clothing for two people until he finds his boxers.  In the pockets of the man’s jeans, he finds fifteen dollars and some pills in a twisted plastic bag.

_...These days are ours, happy and free… _

It’s all hazed in a rusty monochrome.  He sits on the saturated, sheetless mattress and contemplates calling Ryan.  It’s a stupid idea, and he’s too afraid that if he dials he will find the number out of service.  The body on the floor starts to smell like morning breath.  

 

When he kills the cops, he’s nineteen.  In between those years are two boys homes and visits with his handcuffed mother that a social worker takes notes on from the corner.  He kills a few strangers between the boys homes, but doesn’t consider them significant and by the time he is seventeen he thinks he’s past all that, decides to go legitimate with his violent streak and join the military.  The structure is a struggle but he cuts his hair short, learns to make his bed, spends his days dreaming of dropping the next big one.  He wants to end the world.

 

The world ends in a room with framed degrees on the wall.  There is a woman with too much lipstick, so much that it clumps like butter in the wrinkles of her lips and corners of her mouth when it forms polite, clinical terms of condemnation and confirm what Trevor’s always feared.  After that, there’s no point in trying to fight it.  He’s incapable of goodness, or even of any kind of organized, justified evil.  The electricity that flows through him is the kind that kills, not the kind that powers.    

 

He does what he can with that information.  It’s mostly small jobs, driving cars from one border town to another.  Coke comes up from the south.  He drives meth down to the north.  He sleeps a few hours a week, eats a candy bar every three days, generally wastes away and within a few months he is a clockwork tin soldier.  He winds himself up in truckstop bathrooms.  He strangles a hitchhiker a few miles from Niagra falls.  It’s the kind of existence that’s unsustainability is exactly what allows him to sustain it- the implicit promise that his remaining lifespan could be measured in months is comforting.

 

He’s just south of the border when the trouble starts.  The first car that pulls him over has two officers and they both die still halfway in their vehicle.  The one that chases him eventually loses control.  He watches it crumple like a tin can under the falling streetlight.  It ends in a standoff in a 24 hour convenience store.  Out of twelve cops, he manages to shoot ten and kill four.  

 

In the back of the cop car, he can’t stop laughing.  


	2. Shooting Holes In The Moon

Michael is back at work the day after the funeral.  He is suddenly everybody’s son, a department of surrogate fathers eager to fill the void with grand stories of a man he’d never really known.  He suspects that most of them are lies, but after 30 years on the force, his father had made enough of an impact that Michael feels more with family at work than he had in a church full of aunts and cousins.  Until now, he resented falling into corrections, as much as he could resent something that had been handed to him as a lifeline.  He didn’t have many other choices after a fight in the basement of a house party ruined his football career.  

 

They have something for him.  It’s in the middle of his shift when two senior officers pull him aside to tell him the good news.  They’re coy, fraternal, and Michael isn’t sure how to respond to the informality.  

It starts out sounding like a favor of convenience.

“We’re moving you to the night shift.”

And that’s all that he assumes it is, a small kindness to allow him to better care for his widowed mother.  He’s not suspicious until one of his bosses asks him to grab a specific pen out of the back office and, on the desk next to it, there is a file left conspicuously open.  

_ Philips, Trevor:  _

_ Murder In The 1st Degree _

_ Cell 37E _

He’s seen the mugshot before, a scrappy tweaker with the distinctly bad skin of a teenager standing just over the 6’1” line and grinning with unbrushed teeth, visibly dirty even in the grainy black and white print.  It’s the same picture they used on the news.  On first glance the grin is provocative, mocking, but he soon finds himself reminded of the bared teeth of a frightened ape.  He forgets to bring the pen back, but it’s never mentioned.  The permission is obvious.

 

It takes him four shifts to work up the courage to walk past the cell.  He’s not sure what he expects to see.  Philips is asleep and looks shockingly human.  He could be any other junkie.  Michael comes back the next two nights and is shocked to see the same thing; unconscious, vulnerable, skin and bone.  After that, something is different.  The body on the bed is cadaver-stiff and he watches a breath rush in to swell the inmate’s chest under the blanket.  Michael comes closer to the bars and watches Trevor’s brow bend, his eyes shutting tighter.  He loses track of time and sends an entire shift hypnotized by the telling twitches in the face of the other man as he pretended to sleep.

 

That afternoon, in and out of a stuttering caffeine fog, he debates his next step.  Flashes of that baboon-grin strobe in his dreams and he awakens on the couch, cold and inexplicably panicked.  He remembers watching the younger man’s face twist under his shadow- fear, muted but unmistakable.  He wants to see more of it, raw an unrestrained and his head swarms with fantasies of disassembling the inmate’s cold composure. The obligation to perform some awesome feat of destruction against his father’s murderer is a weight around his neck.  

He can’t sleep.  He feels choked.


	3. You Are The Key (And) You Take Me Apart

A week passes before the cell door opens.  It happens long after the lights go out, long enough that Trevor has adjusted to the darkness.  He’s not sleeping.  He hasn’t slept, not really, since Michael started watching him.  He realizes, now, that he’s been on alert for the tumbling of a key or the groan of the bars opening.  When he hears both, he understands how little being prepared had meant.  He could have been sleeping this entire time.

 

Michael Townley somehow blots out even the darkness, a black hole of a presence.  He slides the wall closed again and locks it into place, all without turning his back.  Then he stands still, like before, just on the inside now.  He doesn’t dare approach the cot.  

“I know you’re awake.” He says, finally.  

Trevor opens his eyes and grunts affirmatively but otherwise lays cadaver-still.  

Michael draws his sidearm and a long silence follows.

“So what is this?” Trevor finally asks. “You try’na crawl up in my bed?”

“I- shit, what?.” Michael blurts, thrown off by the inmate’s bold tone. 

“Been watching me since I got here, now you’re in my cell with the door locked and you’re pointing a gun at me.  Next step ain’t hard to guess, sugar.”  He makes a dry noise, maybe a laugh dying in the back of his throat.

“Sounds like you want me to.”

“If that’s not what this is,” the junkie doesn’t move to avoid the path of the gun when it’s pointed at him. “Then what is this?”

“I dunno.”  He admits, and now this all feels stupid.  “I was gonna-” He finishes the sentence by waving the pistol.  

“Do it through a pillow or you’ll go deaf.” No fear.  Relief, even.

“What?”

“You ever fire that in a space this small?”  A slight northern accent peaks through in his impatience.  “You’ll blow your fuckin’ eardrums out.”

It’s nonchalant and makes the whole situation feel like a fever dream.  Trevor sits halfway up and removes the dingy pillow from under his head.  He holds it out.

“You want me to shoot you?”

“I mean,” he laughs again, genuine this time, like at a joke.  “Not if you’re gonna keep making it  _ weird _ .”

Michael doesn’t, because the power has suddenly shifted and he can’t shoot somebody who is laughing at him and all he wants is to get away from this psycho.  He’s on the other side of the bars again, slamming the gate and shoving his key into the lock with such force that he jams a finger.

 

When he wakes up in the late afternoon on his mother’s couch, he’s not sure any of it happened at all.  She drinks in her room like she’d been in love.  Maybe she had, once, but certainly not by the time that he died.  He’s been noticing more and moreover the last few weeks how people forget the bad shit about dead people.  That must be it, he decides.  That’s why Philips wanted him to shoot.  Everybody loves dead people.  He tells himself that the younger man hadn’t startled him.  He hadn’t been thrown off, he just couldn’t kill a guy who wanted to be dead.  He hadn’t felt a jolt of terror run through him at the cracking of the other’s laughter, no, he’d only backed off to plan something worse.


	4. Bringing Disease To The Surface

Michael fights to keep the junkie off his mind for weeks.  He doubles his pace past cell 37E when he makes his rounds.  Despite himself, he imagines vines or tentacles or alien tendrils will snake through the bars and wind around him, strangle him, squeeze until his ribs give.  That they will pull him in, absorb him, that he’ll be fed to the demon beneath the prisoner’s pale, scabbed skin.  He notices that Philips has started sleeping again.  It feels like a loss when the expression on his unconscious face could be mistaken for something like peace.

 

The incident happens off Michael’s shift.  Maybe he dreams about it.  Maybe the scene becomes such an omnipresent fantasy that his brain catalogues it as a memory.  It is glass-clear, sharp on the surface of his mind.

Trevor, unmistakably Trevor, hunched against the tile of the open shower.  The water is turned off.  Diluted red, almost orange liquid pools by the floor drain.  

Trevor opens his mouth, like he is going to say something.

Blood pours out.  

He pukes up another two or three mouthfuls.

“It’s not mine.  It’s not mine.” 

There are chunks of something that looks like uncooked chicken.  They ride the tide toward the drain and hang above the grates, too large to go down.

“It’s not mine.  I- I oh fuck! I think swallowed it!”

Trevor is trying to push them through with his thumb.

Then he does something, Michael isn’t exactly sure what.  He bursts out either laughing or crying.  The specifics of only that moment are fogged by conflicting reports.

 

The details he gets from his boss are bare and spoken with exhausted disgust.

“Some skinhead cornered him, knocked him around a little.  I… he… Jesus, Townley.  Jesus.  He ate the guy’s cock.”

“He bit it all the way off? Michael asks, intrigued. 

“Ate it.  Chewed and swallowed.”  The superior shakes his head. “You young guys, your whole generation, it’s… I mean Jesus H Christ, Townley.  Sonofabitch eats a raw dick and then just sits there and waits to get walked in on.  What kind of sick shit-”

“Subhuman.” Michael says, and his boss agrees.

 

It’s all he can think about for days.  Alone in the house, laid out on the couch with the blinds drawn and the door double-locked, he dwells on it.  His hand moves up his own thigh, and he tries not to notice how the skin had gotten softer, more give to it than back in his football days.  The contact with himself closes some circuit and allows the fantasy to pass through him, igniting sparks when his fingers move along his skin.

Philips, made small by some menacing shadow.  Stripped to sockets and vertebrae, skinless-looking and covered in rose petal-colored scabs.  Soaked in the chemical-smelling water from the trickling showerhead, shaking with fear but telling himself it's the cold- Michael’s cock twitches to life at the thought of watching his knobby legs turn in on themselves, quake, struggle to support him as he is crowded against the wall by a nondescript and unimportant figure.  A placeholder of sorts.

He grips himself and starts to stroke.

Disembodied hands push Philips to his knees.  They grip his jaw, wind mercilessly in his hair, slap his cheeks bright red and shove fingers in his mouth, an impossible quantity of hands, but Trevor takes their abuse, bends to their manipulation, sucks at the digits forced between his bleeding lips.  In the fantasy, his expression flickers; helpless, humiliated terror but at other times he is wide-eyed and moans and bats his lashes like a cumshot girl from a porno Michael rented once.

He picks up his pace, hips bucking into the narrow tunnel of his fist.

The inmate in front of him, reduced to nothing in his presence, hesitantly parting his lips to accept the swollen head of Michael’s cock.  The spasms of his throat as he chokes, tries weakly to pull up for air only to be forced further down.  Tears on his face, nose bloodied against Michael’s pelvis.

When he cumms, he imagines that it is into the unwilling esophagus of the man whose life he’s sworn to ruin.


	5. Save A Little Space That Ill Divide

Trevor is trying to take his drugs, but nothing is working out right.  

 

His hands are shaking too hard and he doesn’t trust himself to raise one to his face with the precious pile of powder cresting the limits of an overgrown fingernail.  When he does, he find himself obstructed by the steady flow of blood from his nose, painful to snort back through almost-certainly-broken bone.  His tongue darts out to catch the drip from his upper lip; it is chemically-bitter and he laps at the spot to clean the flow long after it only tastes like copper.  

 

He braces his forehead in the corner where the two walls meet, inhales to clear his sinuses until there are tears in his eyes but he still can’t get them clear enough to not completely waste his high.  Defeated, trembling fingers press the locking lip of the little plastic bag shut.   _ ‘How long can a nose bleed? _ ’ he tries to reason.   _ ‘Either it’ll stop, or I’ll die.  I’ve got what I need.’ _  It takes every ounce of self control in him not to pour the bag into his mouth and swallow the contents like kids do with straws of colored sugar.

 

He doesn’t notice that he isn’t alone in the cell because he hasn’t  _ felt _ alone, not really, even after they were done with him.  About to tuck the bag away behind the plumbing of the nonfunctioning sink, he barely reacts when an arm hooks around his waist, assumes one of them decided he wasn’t finished.  His wrist is sized, pulled back and he closes his fist around the bag.

“Wait.” He jerks his shoulder in resistance.  He has to put the bag away; whatever happens after that, he will deal with it once his drugs are safe.  Then the other’s full weight is on him and all he can do is turn his head to keep the force of the collision from sending shards of bone back into his brain.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk.” Wordless, mockingly parental admonishment and then, “You know this ain’t allowed, Philips.”

The pressure on his wrist grows unbearable as it bends behind his back.  The arm around his middle snakes away and he doesn’t need to open his eyes to know that it’s Townley’s fingers that are forcing his open, pulling the bag from his grip.  He struggles, but the CO is too strong, Trevor pinned with just his chest, both hands free to pry.

 

Once the drugs are out of his grip, he doesn’t have it in him to fight the handcuffs.

“Gonna be a hell of a write-up.” Michael taunts. “You been to solitary yet?”

“Wait.” Trevor repeats dumbly. “Wait. Wait.  What do you want for them?”

“Hmm?”

When Trevor is turned to face the taller man, his eyes are filled with the same impatience as they’d been filled with under the barrel of Michael’s gun.  That annoyed,  _ how-do-you-not-get-it _ stare.

“To keep it, to keep the drugs.  What do I have to do?”

 

The image of Trevor in that moment burns into Michael’s memories, surfacing regularly in the shower or the darkness-obscured face of some random girl in the bathroom stall of the bar by his mother's house or, eventually, in the therapist’s office years later.  Both lips are split, swollen into a pout and painted lipstick-red from blood.  It drips to stain his undershirt, pools in the chambers that form sunken under his collarbones and trails in ribbons that continue as far as the knees of his grey sweatpants.  They are oversized, elastic puckered, held up by the pressure of an elbow but too short to reach his ankles.  His head had still been full of hair back then, almost pretty, it was easy to see why he was a popular target.

“Please,” a little mist of red sprays out on the first consonant. “You don’t know what I went through to get it.”

Michael laughs. “I think I can guess.”  

There are entire handprints purpling under Trevor’s pale skin, as clear as paint.  A blue-black, almost-green-at-the-edges ring circles his throat,and neither of them really realize that Michael is touching it until he has been for a while. It breaks the ice for the blunt crudeness of the proposition.

“I’ll suck your cock.”

When Michael’s brow furrows, he repeats himself and adds “I’m good at it.”  Without waiting for a response, his gave slips into the middle distance and he drops to his knees.

If it hadn’t been for the highly-publicized castration/cannibalism incident a month or so earlier, Michael would have let him.  Instead he grabs Trevor’s face and pushes him back into the wall.

“Fuck off.”

And, although he’s been distantly aware of it for a few minutes, it doesn’t really register until Trevor, voice hoarse from the abuse or the desperation or both, points out “You’re hard.”

Michael’s hand moves in front of his lap, half to cover himself and half for the relief of kneading his palm into his growing erection.  “Not hard enough to stick my dick where it’s gonna get bitten off.”

“I bite any of them?” 

“They fucked your mouth?”

Trevor nods, and the dull embarrassment in his eyes swells a pressure between Michael’s legs until he’s openly toying with himself.

“You take it all the way back?  Bet you do.  Bet you don’t even gag.”

When he unzips his pants, one hand knots in Trevor’s bangs to keep his head a safe distance.

“You swallow?”

With his head held still, Trevor has to answer, “Yea.”  He tries to lean forward, parts his busted lips but it’s confident, practiced, not like in Michael’s fantasies.

Michael holds him back.

“Anything, anything you want.”

“They really put you through it, huh?” Michael’s voice is low, the question more directed at himself than the man kneeling in front of him.  “They fuck your ass, too?”

Trevor doesn’t answer and he thinks, ‘ _ finally, I hit a nerve _ ’.

“You gonna let me?” He hisses.  “Gonna let me turn you out?  Fuck- you want it, you want it, don’t you.”

When Trevor still doesn’t answer, Michael pulls on the hair in his grip like he’s trying to scalp him.

“You WANT it,  _ don’t you _ !”

Trevor is shaking so hard that Michael’s arm start to numb trying to hold him still.  His voice cracks like a kid’s when he says, “Please.”

“-fucking right… fucking beg for it…”

“I’ll- you- you can,” Trevor stammers and that fear is back in his eyes, real fear, the kind Michael would watch for flickers of through the bars.  Now it pours off every inch of him. “My mouth… my- they-  _ please _ .  I’m torn up real bad, I’ll suck you off but just… just give me a day or two to heal.”  

Michael’s grip loosens in his hair.  It’s an unconscious gesture of pity, but Trevor reads it as a threat of disinterest and says, “Fine. Wait, fine.  Fine.”

“ _ ‘Fine’ _ What?”

When Trevor’s defeated voice mumbles, “You can fuck me,” Michael watches semen spatter across his face without registering right way that it’s his.  He zips up and there is a weighted silence.  Trevor isn’t really looking at him, more like past him, one eye closed with DNA hanging off the lashes and dripping down his cheek like snot-thick tears.  

 

He is on the other side of the bars, just finished uncuffing Trevor’s hands, when he makes a deliberate show of pocketing the bag.

“Wait, you-”

“I never agreed to anything.” Michael smirks.

Rage settles into the inmate’s face.

“Finish making the deal next time before you act like such a slut.”

Trevor’s complexion flushes red and within seconds he is reaching through the bars, snarling threats, swearing murder.  

Michael just steps back out of reach.

“How about you clean my cum off your face before you start with the tough guy shit.” He laughs at the frenzied outburst.  

 

For the rest of the day, the weight of the little bag in his pocket feels heavier than his gun.


	6. With Eyes Wide Shut (We Lay Stagnant Awake)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everybody who pushed me to continue this <3  
> This chapter is a bit lighter aside from some Trevor-Mommy-Issues Angst. No Trikey in this one, but we get to meet Brad.
> 
> Once again, thank you to all my amazing supporters who convinced me not to abandon this piece. Updates should be pretty regular from now on.

Brad Snider is fresh out of high school. He’s sort of ugly, sort of dumb, sort of exactly Trevor’s type.  He’s big like guys who grow up on farms get big, overfed and all shoulders.  Trevor thinks Brad might be falling in love with him in the very-temporary way that these landlocked closet-cases always tended to.  He finds himself both addicted to and annoyed by the other’s clumsy attempts at intimacy. 

 

He prefered a more transactional, utilitarian version of sex.  It hurt less, then, when they inevitably decided that didn’t want him anymore.

 

Men had been an overabundant resource since long before he was old enough to manipulate, or even tolerate their seemingly-inevitable hunger for him.  He liked to think, in those early days, that his mother was no worse than drugged and neglectful and that was why she never came when he screamed for her.  The memories were always right there; the burn of skin against his, infinite-rage-socked feet dangling helplessly, the way the arm of the sofa dug deep to iron the air out of him. He liked to think that it must have just been easier to take their cash after the fact, when nothing else could be done about it.  Eventually though, he realized why Ryan ran off, why nobody came to rescue he when he screamed.  It brought him some strange pride back then, though, to know how much more he was worth than his mother, even if he never saw a cent of it.

 

The night he snapped was the night he truly failed as a son.  She came out and saw all the blood.

_ “That yours?  Gonna fuking die on me you little shit? _ ”

And when she realized that it wasn’t, realized what Trevor had done, she laid into him with an iron pan.  

_ “Worthless” _ she said with every strike.

_ “Stop your goddamn sniveling!” _

He did, he owed her at least that much for interrupting her shows.

 

He awoke in the hospital, and from there he was sent to the state home.  He’d been found in the abandoned trailer, sprawled out on the kitchen floor, so dehydrated that he couldn’t peel his own eyelids open in the ambulance, although he’d been conscious enough to beg for his mother.  She visited once, wearing padded handcuffs and supervised by a social worker.

“ _ You ruined our life, Trevor _ .” There was some mourning behind the bite of the accusation.  

He knew he had, zoning in and out of her rambling.

“ _ Should have left you in that dumpster.  Worthless.  Good for nothing.  You’ve brought nothing but pain into my life. _ ”

And hadn’t he?

“ _ Couldn’t keep your goddamn legs closed, could you?  Couldn’t let me have a man to myself?  But then once I get a few dollars for it, once I turn your bullshit into a way to keep us above water, you’re too good to lay on your back.  You think you’re so much better than me, don’t you? _ ”

They escorted her out, and he never saw her again.

He transferred homes every few months, but no matter where they sent him he’d be sleeping with half the male staff by the end of his first week.

 

He is the one who lures Brad in.  It’s not hard to pinpoint the other as a plausible target; that pent-up, perpetually guilty fidgeting he is prone to gives it away.  Trevor sees him looking, let’s him, puts on something of  show even.  He wears his towel low out of the shower, stretches and flexes slipping into or out of his clothes.  

 

The day after Michael steals his drugs, Brad find Trevor curled on the floor with his hands still cuffed behind his back and his face scraped raw and bloody against the concrete.  He shakes and spits up bile, sweating so bad his t-shirt is transparent.  He can’t offer much more than a bottle of water, but the compassion of the act isn’t lost on Trevor.

 

He knew it would be bad, being locked up in the same county as all the cops he killed, but he is surprised at just how blatant it is.  He wakes up, untouched, in the same place he’d been beaten unconscious an hour before.  He limps down to the infirmary to have the gashes inside of him stitched up, even though every night they wind up ripped back out.  Every pair of his pants have the same bloodstain blossoming out from the seat, but the guards only notice to quip about him being ‘on his period’.  

 

Brad, maybe because he is the youngest of them, is different.  Brad exists in small acts of humanity that fester into something like affection.  Brad brushes the hair out of his face, kisses at his neck, asks in a worried tone things like, “Can I?” and “Is this okay?” and “I’m not hurting you, am I?”  Brad is the closest thing he’s ever known to love.

It terrifies him.


	7. Must Be A Real Dream

A year passes, and Michael is unpacking his uniform coat from the attic.  His mother died in the gold-orange fog blurring summer into fall, and  left the house and a glass tower of the various poisons that put an end to her.  Michael is drunk, and sometimes on dark and stormy nights with a low moon like in horror movies he imagines that the compulsion to drink was a physical ghost that possessed one disposable shell after the next in his bloodline. He sees it like smoke off the end of his cigarette, the grey ghost that haunted his father had settled firmly into him.

 

He slumps it on to go outside, checks the pockets for forgotten bills or lost lighters that will feel sappy and nostalgic in his vodka-logged brain.  Vodka, like a teenager.  Like he’s home alone and they’ll be back to scold him.

He laughs.

It aches.

 

He puts the coat on because there is an early snowfall, the logical part of him saying to just smoke in the house, but unable to let go of the fantasy that they were just away, that it would be disrespectful to smoke inside their house.  It is slightly snug but fits just well enough to spare from having to acknowledge how the carved angles of his once-perfect body have rounded and dulled in his grief.   

 

At first, he doesn't recognize the small bag.  He thinks it is maybe packaging that never got discarded, or something to keep moths from eating the fabric (his mother always had been so worried about those goddamn moths) but then it all floods back.  Philips, pathetic fucking Philips on his knees, fucked-senseless, mumbling pleas to have the bag returned.  The loss in his eyes when Michael had pocketed the bag- it was practically offencive.  The sorry prick didn’t know what loss was.  He’s looked at the drugs disappear with the same weight that Michael watched dirt cover his father’s coffin.

 

This was his fault.  This was ALL his fault, the junkie bastard.  Michael's fury had cooled, distracted by government documents and funeral bills and a new liquid hobby in the absence of his mother’s languishing illness.  He’d almost forgotten.  He’d almost turned his back and let some common thug steal his revenge.

 

\--

 

Trevor is sleeping when Michael opens his cell door.  He doesn’t stir at the sound, and at first Michael believes that he is faking but when he is right over him he sees that the inmate is completely slack, lips slightly parted, softly snoring.  He sleeps peacefully, fearlessly, Michael thinks.  But then, looking closer, he sees something else.  Not peace;resignation.  

 

His breath was hot and foggy on Michael's palm before he clamped a hand over the inmate’s mouth.  Trevor’s eyes shot open for just a second, then closed again.  His frame relaxed with his falling eyelids and Michael was completely on top of him. Neither of them could account for exactly when or how that had happened but Michael was somewhat let down by the numb compliance.  It made him feel over-cautious when he cuffed Trevor's wrists overhead to the metal bed frame. 

He produced the small bag of powder, held it in front of the prisoner's eyes and watched them blow wide.  It was Trevor who moved, then, hips rising to rock against Michael's thigh.

There was a coiling sensation in the pit of his loins when the smaller male and he found himself pressing back, the barrier of cloth almost painful as it held back their body heat.  Michael’s hand moved to the inmate’s throat and he puts all his weight on the one arm, watching pale skin turn pink and then purple, sunset colors, eyes swimming in independant direction, Trevor's cock swollen hard against his as the life is strangled out of him.

\---

 

Michael wakes up on the couch, hungover and sweat-drenched and painfully hard.  He looks over to the coat rack where his jacket hangs, pocket fastened tight but, to his eyes, overflowing with all the atrocities that he fantasizes about in the name of revenge. 

* * *

 


	8. When Can One Wake And Live Again

Trevor bruises easily.  He barely even notices it anymore, considers it just another way that his skin is blemished.  Sometimes, when he tries to sleep at night, he feels the welts and it’s like a ghost of it all is still happening.  He tries not to think about what it means to be so used to it.  

 

He dissociates most of the time.  He doesn't eat or shower, stops going out to the yard and just lays in his bunk for most of the day.  It’s been this bad before, and he tries to remind himself that these foggs always pass eventually.  At least the apathy makes everything a little bit easier to tolerate. 

 

He is laying tangled in the tubing behind a row of washing machines when Michael finds him.  He’s just conscious enough to resist the contact when the guard tries to pull him to his feet.  Once he starts swinging, aimless but powerful, Michael can see that all four fingers on both hands have snapped somewhere between the first and second knuckle, shattered like he’d been punching concrete.  He snarls, eyes still closed, blood coming from both ears, then passes back out.

 

The nurse on call is a few years older than them, the sister of a boy on Michael’s high school football team.  Heavy-set and maybe a little slow, he vaguely remembers bullying her when they were in elementary school.  She regards him with open disdain, disgust even, when he comes through the doors with the battered inmate. 

 

She confronts him in the parking lot at the end of his shift.  She stinks of coffee and when he takes a cigarette from his pack, she holds her hand out expectantly.  He’s so thrown off that he finds himself not only handing her one, but lighting it before his own.

“You need to do your job, because I can’t do mine.” She scolds.

“Hmm?” 

“That Philips kid, every day somebody brings him in and he’s worse.”

“He gets in a lot of fights.” He opens his car door, and expects that will be enough to dismiss her.  Instead, she aims her smoke at the interior in the vehicle when she exhales.

“I’m not stupid, we all know who he is.  Nobody will sign to let medical keep him overnight.”

He climbs in the car, and momentarily but seriously debates running her over.

“If you don’t step in, he’ll die.”

She sticks her arm in the door to keep him from shutting it, so insultingly confident that he won’t slam it on her.  He figures that, to her, the change in his expression must look like sympathy when her words sink in.

 

He insists on walking back in with her right then, and signs the paperwork to transfer Trevor to solitary confinement.

“You can always come to me with your concerns.” He assures her.  “Justice was important to my father, it’s something I hold in high regard.”

__~~****~~

* * *

>  


	9. A Way Of Crystalizing The Bad Times

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very NSFW chapter. Please mind the tags as a content warning, and thank you as always to everybody who has been following this dumpster fire of a story

Whenever the cell door opens, Trevor thinks, ‘this is it”.  He braces for it, whatever it is, until the tension itself is torture.  It burns.  The sting is fresh whenever he sees the hallway light cut on and shine into the unlit room.  He dodges the beam it strikes in.  He makes peace with it, he says he’s ready for it, however it comes he almost finds himself looking forward to it. 

 

He knew, when they took him downstairs to the single unit isolated wing instead of back to his cell, that they were going to kill him.  That was fine, still is fine, or would be if they could just get it over with.  They never did, though, just pushed food in through a slot.  Twice, somebody opened the door all the way and walked him to a single shower stall at the end of the quiet hallway.

 

He has no concept of time.  Everything happens irregularly.  The guards who know his name skip his cell on their shifts.  Time distorts in the shadow of their negligence.  He survives almost as if to spite himself.  In the quiet stretches that are no longer distinguishable as day or night, the void of sobriety chews with razor teeth.  He wills the emptiness to swallow him but instead he finds his skin up against the sharp edge of it.

 

Lonely and hungry and sober conglomerate into the overly-general ache of absence.  No, he’s not afraid that they’ll kill him; he’s afraid that this is it, that they’ve already started.  

 

He doesn't recognize Michael when his face appears in the little square window.  It’s the third time that he has been walked down the hall, but he notices doors other than his own and is sure that he hadn’t before.  Something feels wrong, and at first he’s paranoid that he is being led off somewhere strange, but once he gets to the shower he realizes that it’s the guard, the fucking guy won’t stop staring at him.  His eyes have weight, at least as heavy as a set of hands as they map the topography of bone and veins.

 

The water won't heat up, no matter which way he turns the knob.  The gaze that pins him is drilling, violating, colder than the water.  Then Michael speaks.

“You look a lot better than last time.”

“Hmm?” He turns and twists, trying to disappear.  

“The bruises, they’re gone.  You don’t remember?  Shit, you were in a bad way.”

Trevor just shrugs.  Being naked wasn't something he ever had much of a problem with, but there is a pressure inside of his head that he can't  explain and it builds up, stretching him thinner, with each passing second of the other’s staring.

“They weren't sure you were gonna make it.  You were in and out for over a week.  Real waste of taxpayer money if you ask me.”  Michael turns a dial to to kill the radio clipped to his shirt.  “But I signed the papers to save you.  To move you down here.”  He recognizes the motion, something Brad had done, too.  Once, he’d even confided in Trevor that he suspected that the transmissions were all taped and stored in a government warehouse out east.  “You’re alive because of me.  Just keep that in mind, yeah?”

 

Trevor knows what is going to happen next, because when he steps out of the shower Michael cuffs him.  He’s still got the towel tied around his middle.  He walks slow, fights the instinct to drag his feet.  It's a feeling that he always thinks should be faded by this point, cold dread that crumples and folds his timeline in on itself.  His mind’s eye stares at the nicotine-yellowed wallpaper of his mother's living room.  The sound of a studio audience laughing in the distance makes him snap his head to the side, following the noise.  At first he thinks that the smell has escaped from a memory, cigarette smoke and the sterile-sharp bite of alcohol.  

No, it’s on Michael’s breath.  Trevor catches a lungful when the larger man looming above him steps closer to close the door behind them.  When it latches shut, leaves them both in the dark, he feels the guard freeze up.  He almost wants to laugh at the guy because the silence stretches out, awkward, and it's like the walls are closing in.  Neither of them move.

 

A hand brushes his hipbone, trails all the way up to the bottom of his ribcage. Another comes up around his throat- he leans into the contact.  And for a second it’s good, almost too good just to be touched by another person, even if it’s like this.  The hand at his neck tightens around the sides to open rifts in his vision.  He lets himself be walked across the room, braces on the wall when Michael slams him up against it.  

 

Everything he does is so much rougher than it has to be, kicking Trevor’s legs apart and yanking his own belt open with such impatient force that one of the loops is torn half-off his uniform pants.  He unzips, but Trevor can see when he turns his head that Michael’s pants are still up.  The next thing he sees is a set of knuckles when a fist collides with the bridge of his nose.  He breaths in blood, chokes to force it up out if his lungs.

“Don’t look at me you piece of shit!”  

 

Michael has no idea what he is doing, his touch alternating between cruelty and a confusing softness.  He tries, first, to shove in dry, but the friction is too painful and the body under him tenses to shut him out.  Trevor has to tell him to use spit, the hand around his neck tightening to crush the words into a dry croak.  When the resistance gives, the pain is so enormous that it shoots up Trevor's neck and makes his ears ring.  He trembles as the excruciating mass sinks into him. 

“Wait… wait…” he wheezes.

“Shh-” Michael whispers into the back of his head.  One hand kneads at his jagged hip before grabbing it to steer the convict back when he arches his spine and tries to squirm away.

Trevor shakes his head, frantic.  He tries to say something, but the hand on his throat moves up over his mouth.

“Shh- That's right, all of it.  You’re gonna take the whole thing, fuckin’ whore.”  Michael hisses in his ear, probably lines from.some porno that he’d never had the nerve to try out with a girl.

“Too much?” Michael taunts, growls, “Is my cock too big for you?”

Trevor is in too much pain to care about the humiliation of nodding in confirmation.

When the hand leaves his mouth, returns to his neck but without the pressure, he begs, “Please, it hurts.” 

“Say it again.” The hot breath on the back of his neck makes all the hairs stand on end. 

“It hurts.”

“Why?”

Trevor doesn't hesitate to say it. “T-too much.  Your cock, your cock’s too big.  I can’t.”

“Don’t try and flatter me,”  Finally, there is no space left between them. “I’ve read your file.  This is all you’ve ever been good at.”

 


	10. Discord and Harmonize

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dumpster fire burns on

Michael can't account for how things unravel.  He’s been drinking, which is slowly becoming his new normal and he isn't sure if his supervisors don't notice or just don't care but after he gets away with it a few times he is emboldened by their enabling.  Tonight it just supposed to be paperwork, anyway.  

 

Time skips out on him and he works on autopilot until he comes across a familiar file; Philips, T.  He flips past the form he needs to fill out, to the stack of documents and trial records that trace his movements from boy’s homes to juvenile detention centers and back again.  It feels invasive, skipping through the mugshots and ID photos to watch the prisoner grow younger, softer, smaller, until a child’s face glances shyly up from the photocopy.  In the very back of the file, past a tab marked “additional notes” are the documents from his mother’s life sentence.  It’s a cold, clinical itinerary- a list of half-healed injuries and a ledger of men's name and some papers confirming Trevor’s refusal to testify against her.

 

The last thing in the file is a white paper envelope with a metal press-lock holding it closed.  He bends the two foil arms up, opens it to look inside, then realizes what he’s looking at and reflexively slams the folder shut.  He feels sick, holds the edge of the desk to steady himself against the rush of vertigo.  

 

The picture wasn't particularly graphic, definitely not the worst he has seen in his line of work; a bruised, emaciated kid shot from the hips up.  When he closes his eyes, the photo negative is scarred into the backs of his eyelids.  This is different, more personal than any of the other records of atrocities that he has stumbled across in the years since graduation; he knows that, to some extent, he has seen the origin of his own pain.  He has seen the horrible thing that set off the chain reaction that destroyed his family.  There isnt anything to do about it, other than to just keep drinking.  It’s what he does, what he plans to keep doing until suddenly he has run out of paperwork, still only halfway through his shift. 

 

His memory gets spotty after that.  He doesn't even remember leaving the office, but when he reposesses himself he is staring, fascinated, at the slight change in the shape of Trevor's bleeding nose, the vibrations of the impact still echoing in the muscles of his arm.  He does it to make Trevor stop looking at him, because when he’d turned around Michael didn't really see his face.  He saw that picture again, the dull eyes of the boy pleading with whoever held the camera for mercy that he knew would be denied.

 

He blinks and he’s home, standing in the yellow flickering light of a bathroom that hasn't been cleaned since his mom was alive.  There's blood around the zipper of his uniform pants, staining the front of his boxers, dried to the front of his thighs when he strips down and steps into the shower.  He knows, vaguely, that he has done something that he can't go back from.  He stands under the water until the pipes groan and start running cold, frustrated that no amount of scrubbing makes him feel clean again.  

 

The world spins and bobs and makes him seasick nauseous when he lays in his bed and he tries in vain to think of anything other than those eyes. 

 


	11. You Are Defeat

When it’s over, Michael throws Trevor onto the cot without freeing his hands.  He leaves him in the darkness, unable to re-dress or clean himself off or do anything but turn over onto his front, kicking the only blanket off the sheetless mattress in a pathetic attempt to keep the only thing he owns clean. 

 

He’s thankful for the dark, feels clothed by it.  His shoulders ache from how his arms twist behind his back, and any attempt to rearrange himself and stop the building ache threatens to pop them pop out of the sockets.  

This has always been the worst part, even when he was young.  It was worse than the pain, worse than the humiliation of the act itself.  He was alone now, all alone with what he was, with what he let them do to him.  He felt sewn inside a body that belonged to everybody other than him.  When he was really little, he would cry for his mother.  Times like this, after it was all over, were the only times she’d ever said she loved him.  They were the only times she held him, the only untainted human contact the world could afford him.  

 

The nightmares started after they sent him to the first state home.  The dream itself was always vague, and vaporized when he opened his eyes.  Vines or wires or the tentacles of some disgusting monster would wind around him, inside him, infesting him erasing him.  He would wake up screaming for her, bed sheets soaked in piss, paralyzed lungs unable to take in a breath.  

 

Time flows over him, at least a day, maybe two.  Long enough that his mouth is desperately dry, and when he breathes he can feel brittle flakes of dead tissue rattle when the air goes to his lungs.  it passes quiet and painlessly until the key turns in the door.  

 

Townley again, looking sheepish and guilty, aftershave overpowering the faint smell of liquor.  Trevor’s arms have swollen twice their size at the joints, he’s too sore to even sit up and acknowledge the officer’s entrance.  He keeps his arms in the same place when the cuffs are removed, unable to bend them more than a few degrees.

 

He turns his head to the wall.  He doesn't want to be looked at, and reaches for the sheet before remembering that he’d kicked it to the floor.  Absolute darkness still isnt dark enough.  The other is standing over him, he can feel his body heat in the damp cell, but still he won't turn back to face him.

“Hey” Michael shoves light at his shoulder.  “Water.”

He closes his eyes.  He doesn't want water, he doesn't want to keep this up any longer.  It's already been long enough.  Had any day ever proven to be better than the one that came before it?  

“Just- hey,” Michael grabs his shoulder again and forces him halfway onto his back.  When Trevor makes out his face in the dark, he looks like he’s seen ghosts.  His free hand extends to bring a plastic coin bag into view.  “Just don't tell anybody.”

Trevor’s sore arms lock up, he reaches for the bag so fast that he thinks he can feel muscle tearing off the bone.  The will to live ripples through him when the bag hits his chest.

Alone with the thought, it was almost funny. What was the point of telling when nobody ever cared?

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow im almost 10k words into this thing. Spite is a better motivator than I thought it would be lmfao 
> 
> As always thanks to eveybody who has been following/commenting

**Author's Note:**

> So apparently my tumblr fanclub has this story bookmarked and is still trying to make some conspiracy theory work where me and my housemate are the same person because we shared a writing tips blog and once blogged about the same cartoon while we were in thr same room watching it together, and because they supposidly disagree with her, they feel the need to spam my comments. I don't quite understand the series of missteps in logic that have lead us all here but I suppose thats what I get for drawing attention to myself on the blue hellsite. Once again, thank you to all the amazing readers who inspired me to pick this story back up <3


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